The Hybrid Awakens
by Telandras
Summary: The hybrid on each base star is a puppet, but the intelligence behind it has machinations beyond the ken of the Cylon crew.
1. The Hybrid

**The Hybrid**

Natalie looked concerned. "We're showing structural damage to the dorsal plating, right above the communications arrays, and the best you can say is that it's not habitat critical?" she asked Gustav in frustration.

"What is habitat critical is the weapons grid, if we get another surprise from the colonists," Gustav replied, turning to John as he spoke. "First Cain, and then Adama."

John shook his head. "Adama and Cain are in the same place, wherever they are."

"And that could be one jump from us right now," Gustav pressed on.

"They're not suicidal," Jacob tried to calm the situation. "We've got three impact points, one of them to the superstructure and two to the ventral arms that may be affecting power to the gun targeting systems. Most of the weapons grid is operational—power was re-routed through the auxiliary cables." Both Jacob and Gustav knew the reasoning wasn't sound: there had already been three 'automated' power redirects in unrelated systems following the hull contact with the meteoroids.

Gustav wasn't impressed: "good thing the ship can fly itself, because we're much better at assuring ourselves we know what we're doing." John was also annoyed.

Natalie took a step between the two Model Ones. "Here, three of the Fives are already suited up. Divvy up the repair droids and dispatch them to the ventral arms. I'll take another droid to the impact point above the comm boxes and we can supervise all three repairs at once."

Jacob squeezed in between Jackie and Harper, worried they might side with John and Gustav to repair the ventral damage first. "I'm just worried about what happened the last time we tried to get repairs done on our own schedule," he said, pointing downwards at the Hybrid meditation chamber three decks below. "She'll make her own schedule if we're not driving it pretty hard. I'm willing to go along with Natalie's idea."

John, Jackie, Harper, and Gustav all paused, then agreed. The Ones would have been happy just to get Natalie out of their faces and into a confined place—a spacesuit would do.

"Jacob, we need you in the meditation chamber," one of the Model Eights called to him over the base star's intercom. "The hybrid's behavior is abnormal."

John sent a wary look to Gustav, then turned to Jacob. "They need their hybrid whisperer," he said with derision. "She'll get her own ideas if you don't go drive it hard."

After fighting the colonial navy, the base stars revealed new and organic ways to deal with their respective battle damage, some in deployment and others returning themselves to space dock. The problems arose when the automated repair machinery came across the habitat pods, which Jacob and Gustav had since realized were foreign bodies to the base stars. In some cases, the habitat pods had been rejected like cancerous tumors, and even on their own base star Gustav and Jackie had found themselves running for a stable compartment when repair droids had begun tearing into one of the CO2 scrubbers as if it were just another system that could be pushed out of the way during what they later discovered was routine maintenance.

At times Jacob had been able to detect changes in the hybrids' psychobabble speech patterns and correlate them to functions the base star had been undertaking, but his comprehension of the hybrids, artificial intelligence nodes they had transplanted into the habitat modules to help them run the base stars, was sparse at best. The Ones held unguarded opinions that Jacob's expertise was just a figment of his own imagination. To have a hybrid's stream of consciousness change enough for others to notice it, however, piqued Jacob's interest and worried him to a degree. The three strikes against the hull should have prompted straightforward repairs but instead portended a cascade of responses across the entire ship.

The nitrogen atmosphere above the base star's central computer core held steady at the pressure surrounding a high mountain peak, enough to keep the systems insulated and facilitate heat transfer while balancing the pressure on the cooling compressors. Like most other automated areas of the base star, the compartment was unlit: repair robots would bring their own headlamps or activate LEDs installed around key components. The processor components were all housed in cylindrical silos with redundant thermal conductors all around them circulating their heat to grooves running the length of each tube. Extreme sophistication was housed within, and while access panels were all around Gustav had affixed signs reading "NO ACCESS," "HIGH VOLTAGE," and "HARD POINT" for any future individuals attempting a foray into the base star's brain.

In an instant, the compartment was bathed in a blinding blue light bursting from an aperture appearing between two of Gustav's signs reading "HARD POINT." The aperture, the fourth of its kind to appear at critical locations in the compartment, faded and stabilized before spewing out another round of chalky, white slurry. The stuff spattered in all directions, flying in arcs with mild curvature due to the artificial gravity the humanoid replicants had installed for themselves in the faraway crew habitats. With high affinity for the metal surfaces, the white paste clung to the silo casings and made its way along the grooves, flowing over access hatches and seeping through grill panels into the computing hardware itself. Permeation was more advanced where apertures had opened beforehand: the nanoparticles suspended in the fluid had triggered coagulation, then begun to harvest the paste as fuel and building materials in their work to penetrate the microprocessor architecture and imprint new integrated circuits.

The meditation chamber looked normal, and when Jacob first entered the hybrid sounded normal. All the walls and the ceiling of the square room, eight meters on a side and three meters high, were covered in flat screen displays printing a miasma of status reports, sensor feeds, and other information. With her catatonic stare focused on the ceiling over her bath, the hybrid bubbled off a precise fountain of nonsense, each word seeming pregnant with meaning until the next two or three came out. "Justification for the pronated crystal forms is the only salve for a broken ethos. Neuter coloration brings peace to a shattered ocean wrought with the combustible bliss of nocturnal affection. Never lose faith in the orbit of right triangles: they bow only to one prodigal creator."

Jacob traded glances with Michelle and Enri as what Enri called 'the new process' unfolded again. Even after taking her apart for maintenance and analysis, Jacob marveled at how the textured, plastic rubber molded over servomotors and carbon-fiber bones mimicked human skin and muscle contractions. The android's body, sculpted like a strong swimmer's and adorned with a tight cap and black vinyl two-piece zippered suit, was a natural fit in the water bath. The hybrid's eyes blinked twice, then shut as she sank deeper into the crystal blue water surrounding her. She gripped the azure-lit rim of the basin, white-knuckling with one hand as she slid the other down her face, exhaling all the way. The muscles of her thighs tightened as she pivoted her hips back and forth, fanning and clenching her toes in alternation.

"That's the fifth event in half an hour," Enri noted.

"Hmm, no, that's only four," Michelle disagreed.

"How can you tell?" Harper asked, turning his head towards Michelle and feigning an inquisitive expression. He had entered the room just after Jacob.

Michelle rolled her eyes and turned away. "Female intuition," she muttered.

"I didn't know she could get goosebumps," Jackie exclaimed as she joined the other four standing around the tank. She crossed her arms and watched the ripples in the water dissipate.

"Yeah, she can," Jacob explained. "Her skin has a latticework of piezo-electrics. I haven't seen it do that, but I'm not surprised."

Enri raised his eyebrows and scribbled some notes on his tablet. "You did state in your earlier report that she appears 'fully functional' with respect to the range of human sensory responses," he observed with a hint of dissatisfaction. "Do you expect she is capable of any other complex behaviors? Tantrums, perhaps?"

Jacob called up a report of the hull integrity again on his own pad. After the initial three impacts, the causes of which their EVA teams would soon ascertain, he had gotten six alerts about power surges in various sectors, dozens of reports about pressurization and compensation around the impact points, and four alerts about flux in the habitat modules' gravity fields. The last such flux had occurred five minutes prior, and appeared unrelated to anything the hybrid was experiencing, but reading the outputs it looked like the artificial gravity was compensating for other sources in the upper central core, nearest the impact on the dorsal plating where Natalie was headed.

Jacob glanced at Harper, thinking he might have an insight, but then realized he was being watched. The hybrid was staring at him through somnolent, satiated eyes. After capturing his attention, she looked down at his tablet, gave a tiny grin and then glanced at Harper as he minded himself with his face down in his own tablet. The hybrid frowned with one side of her mouth and shook her head just enough for Jacob to see it. She turned her gaze back to the ceiling where they were all used to having it, opened her radiant blue eyes wide, and straightened her posture as she began to recite more of the familiar word salad that they were all accustomed to hearing echo through her chamber. Jacob folded his tablet back to his chest and dismissed the notion of talking with Harper.

"Negative exon removal is impossible for vertebrate embryos entering the third metastasis of ecumenical lunar atonement," the hybrid prattled. "The convolution is too harmonious for variational compression. Swifter flows the glacial phenotype of a delighted womb."

Jacob made a deliberate survey of the hybrid, then of the panoramic information graffiti stretched around its meditation chamber. The chamber's appearance still hadn't changed: the nonsense had been broken, four times by Michelle's count and five by Enri's, but the screens hadn't stopped or faltered the way her voice had. His pretense set, Jacob made his way into the hall outside as if to check on the connections in a nearby electrical closet. Once inside, he switched his pad into the protected mode he and Natalie had discussed.

"Where are we?" Jacob whispered.

Natalie saw him on her suit's heads-up display. "Got the repair droid," she said. "We're mag-locked and moving up the central axis. Three-hundred meters to the top, then another two hundred to the impact site."

Jacob took a deep breath. That was a long way to space walk with mag-locks, but her suit would be able to sustain the trip. "I've got a different idea, if you're up for it," he said. "Send the droid to the impact site. You divert to the upper computer core. There's an access hatch a hundred meters in front of you, way before you have to get up and over the dorsal arms."

Natalie thought as she continued to march with the magnetic attachments. "Okay, I can send the droid on. Can you unlock the hatch?" Jacob was already accessing the system. "I've got it for you," he replied. "You're going to see one of the universal actuator grips, so three fingers out, just press and turn."

Worried, Natalie frowned. "And hope that the lock turns. I can't exert that much torque with my bare hands."

Jacob thought it through. "You should be good, that side of the ship hasn't been heated to make anything expand. Call the droid back if you need it but remember, they can get ideas of their own. There'll be an airlock to go through, but the air on the other side isn't breathable or high enough pressure so keep your helmet on."

Natalie parted ways with the repair droid and arrived at the hatch as the droid continued to stride arm over arm to the dorsal plating. She was relieved when the hatch opened without resistance. Still, entering the airlock wasn't simple—it wasn't designed for humans in EVA suits, rather for a specific type of repair droid, smaller and outfitted with a different toolset than the one she had started with. "Well this is where I can't call my partner if I get in trouble," she said as she twisted on her back inside the cramped space. She began propelling herself in the low gravity field down the axis of the hundred-meter tube. She couldn't turn around, but she could roll to maintain the best view of what was ahead of her.

"You're in good shape," Jacob assured her. "And the droid you're with can get into that space, it just doesn't look like it at first. If it needs to pull you back out, I'm just going to have you stretch out straight and let it pull on your boot. Now that you're inside I can work the doors if you need."

Natalie grinned. "Such a gentleman to open the door for me. Fifty meters until I get to the airlock," she announced.

Natalie opened the outer airlock door, already deep inside the ship, and propelled herself inside. She still couldn't turn around. Jacob used his tablet to close the outer airlock door, then engaged the pressurization to mimic what a droid would have done with its own access key.

"Other side is saying a quarter bar," Natalie read off her suit's displays. "We're filling with 100 percent nitrogen." There were no readouts or monitors in the airlock itself to tell her what was happening: droids would not have needed any such thing.

"That's what it should be," Jacob said. "The core is on the other side of the next bulkhead. I need to see what's in there. I'm still seeing the right pressure, but I don't know if some of the components have been damaged. The impact point is about fifty meters above you, but that doesn't mean something didn't penetrate further and damage the electronics."

Natalie turned the actuator to open the third and final hatch. The cavernous computer core lay in complete darkness, illuminated only by her suit's head lamps. At last, she had enough room to get out of the rigid pose and turn around. "I've got a bunch of big red tubes," she said, looking down and to either side of her.

"Those are the processor silos," Jacob explained. "There's sixteen. The atmosphere provides thermal conductivity. You probably can feel the fan circulation."

Natalie agreed, grabbing onto one of the nearby droid grapple points to keep her equilibrium against the gentle push of air coaxing her to slowly spin. "Where do I go now?" she asked.

Jacob watched her helmet cam feed carefully. "I'm not sure," he said. "You've still got pressure, so the chamber isn't compromised, but watch out if it gets a slow leak. I may have to evacuate the airlock to get you out if you start losing pressure inside. Look around, see if you can find anything that doesn't seem right."

Natalie maneuvered herself between the cylindrical silos, using her arms to hold herself against the faint force of the habitats' gravity. She avoided looking down—it was only a tenth the standard force of gravity that they experienced in the habitats, but she was holding herself up ten meters above the floor.

"Don't just assume anything is a hand-hold," Jacob reminded her. "Gustav placed placards around in case anyone needed to get in there. You'll need to find the hand-holds."

Natalie nodded and swung herself around the next silo. "Wait, I've got something here," she said. "It's all over this grapple point. And the silo wall, and the panel access. What the hell is this stuff?"

Natalie faced herself at the smear of white paste, runnels of which were now covering her glove and part of her suit's chest plate. "My God, it's everywhere," she exclaimed, rotating herself around and upwards at the ceiling, where a foamy swatch of the stuff was dripping off and oozing onto the silos. "What is it, lubricant? Coolant?"

Jacob shook his head. He hadn't seen anything like the stuff in other Cylon technology he had deconstructed. "Can you figure out where it came from? Is there a rupture anywhere around that big pile?" he asked. Natalie kept turning but couldn't see anything.

"It's not expanding. Whatever laid it down isn't putting it out anymore. But it looks like there was a lot of it all at once." Natalie maneuvered across two more silos. "Here's another mess. Same stuff. Still no broken pipe or anything."

Jacob's tablet flashed: John was approaching the electrical closet. "You're on your own for a few minutes," he warned Natalie. "Be back soon!" Jacob switched his tablet back to its standard mode and downloaded the diagnostics from the hybrid's systems, then hurried back to the meditation chamber.

"Her job is to fly the base star," John Cavil stammered, turning to Jacob as he entered. "I'll tolerate her gibberish as long as that happens, but I'm just not seeing the point of all this space, water, and electricity to take care of a babbling, orgasmic puppet." Michelle was getting worried about his relationship with her sister Sharon. John had quoted figures before on the average Cylon's consumption of critical resources. He had also made jokes about the occasional sexual escapades of unnamed Model Ones. Seeing John reduce the hybrid to material transactions, though, was putting the pieces into a disturbing arrangement.

"Hemi-cyclical seasons never assuage the cravings of a ripe old stalker," the hybrid intoned as John glowered with petulance. "The gregarious nature of misanthrope is ill begotten amongst the universal mass field." The hybrid's face and the toned muscle of her shoulders grew more tense. She moved her foot to press against the end of the bath.

Natalie scooped up some of the white resin with her finger. There seemed to be a drying or setting process with the stuff. She wished her suit had some sample tubes to collect the paste, but she improvised and scraped up some with one of the wrenches from the toolbox on her waist, then stowed the wrench back in place and closed the box back up. It would have to survive the trip through vacuum back to the habitat module for her to get a better analysis.

Lost for a moment among the arcade of silos, she stopped to get her bearings. "Jake, you back?" she asked, feeling herself being tugged in a new direction. At first, she felt it was a downdraft from the nitrogen circulation, but it got stronger. There was a bright flash, and for a moment Natalie could see her own shadow cast on the silos in front of her.

Her hand slick from the white paste, Natalie lost her tenuous hold on the grapple point and began to fall. She steadied herself, trying not to panic. Her suit's thrusters could keep her in place, but she didn't want to use them in the confined, controlled atmosphere of the computer core. Natalie felt herself slipping backwards faster and put her arms out to find new hand holds. The best she could do was to distribute her grip over two of the silo walls, and for the moment it was enough to hold her in place. She gripped one of the grooves on the silo her right and worked one hand onto another grapple point, then twisted herself around to see where she had been headed.

Six meters below and two silos over stood a glowing, glassy orb. Natalie strained to see how the orb could be perched there, with no apparent support, against the pull that affected everything else in the room. At first, she thought it was blue-colored, but what was showing in its mirrored surface? The more she stared at it, she couldn't identify the reflection of anything in the computer core. A few faint droplets of the white goo dislodged from the ceiling, floated past Natalie, and then into the orb. She watched in fascination as the surface seemed to simply accept them—it didn't absorb, or get covered in the goo, the droplets just flew in as if there was no surface at all.

The orb was pulling things in, and it was the new force she was fighting against. Natalie was better able to push back against something she could identify. She focused her suit's head lamps on the orb—it didn't reflect light, rather it seemed like her head lamps could just shine into it and illuminate nothing.

By adjusting her position, she had a realization. The orb wasn't a solid object, and it wasn't reflecting anything in the room: it was a gateway into the space behind the orb, and that space was indeed vast. Trying to light it up with her helmet was like trying to illuminate the far side of a stadium with a weak flashlight.

"Her breathing just changed," Michelle observed in the meditation chamber. "Can't you hear it?"

"Well, maybe with two people on this thing's wavelength we can figure it out," John said in exasperation as the hybrid bit her lip and shifted her posture again. "See if people want to buy a tape of this!" he scoffed as he left the room.

"The genetic life form harkens the morning thunder on its sleepy pilgrimage into aperture science," the hybrid continued with shortening breath. "Child, the trepidation inside your rubber cloister will be inundated with clarity." The hybrid drew in a deep breath and stretched out her hands and arms behind her head. Her eyes closed as a smile spread across her slackened lips. "The cake is not a lie," she let out as she arched her back and thrust her chest forward. Her hips gyrated as her feet and calves flexed against the walls of the tank.

Natalie struggled to regain her posture but could not before a second wave of the paste gushed out of the aperture and slapped hard against the back of her helmet. After falling to the floor amidst the first expulsion, she struggled to regain her footing. The slurry was much heavier than she had anticipated in the low-gravity environment and it carried a lot of momentum when it struck. Her faceplate was covered in streaks of the stuff, blocking a lot of her view and shifting her focus to the mechanisms inside her helmet.

"This is like being kicked through a carwash, Jake," she yelled into her intercom, hoping he would hear her. "What the hell did you get me into?"

Her helmet had withstood the initial impact, but Natalie's displays were now indicating a pressure failure in one of the hoses from her air supply. A second warning indicated that the outer shell on her helmet had been compromised, highlighting the suit's data uplink module. Her head lamps flickered, then died.

"Jake, I need help," she said in desperation. "I think this stuff is eating my suit." Natalie could hear nothing from Jacob. She didn't even get the audible acknowledgement that the intercom had transmitted her message: the line was gone. More system failures were listed out on the suit's HUD, dominating Natalie's field of vision with her face plate blocked and the room darkened. The list grew just before a stream of software faults flooded her display. The surge was short-lived: Natalie's audio feed crackled, the HUD flickered, and the entire system went dead.

"She hasn't started talking again," Jackie observed. "This one was different." All five of the Cylon crew looked on in silence as the exhausted hybrid's head rested in contentment on the rim of her bath. "After the last one she seemed to just doze for a bit," Jackie kept on. "This is more."

Enri scribbled more notes on his tablet. "The habitat systems are still online, but the defensive batteries, active sensors, and drive coils are powered down. Gustav is not going to be happy."

Michelle made a full turn around the room, then looked up at the ceiling. The usual collage of sensor feeds, closed-circuit video, and system performance diagnostics had changed, too. "The displays are off track. Still with the habitat CC video, still with the life support diagnostics, but other than that she's just displaying pictographic nonsense."

"She's dreaming," Jacob suggested. Michelle looked back with sympathy but felt he was grasping at straws.

Harper examined the habitat systems feed, then panned over to additional CC video showing his counterpart Fives inspecting one of the impact points with their repair droids. "We need more people in suits, outside, wiring everything into the auxiliary controls," he concluded. Enri concurred: the auxiliary systems were Gustav's idea, a simple computer interface with a sprawling network of cabled connections for bypassing the hybrid to control the ship. Enri and Gustav had designed the first such workable system but were still bringing it all together. "Life support," he said, pointing to Michelle and Jackie. "Weapons, drive?" he asked Enri. All four left the room together.

Jacob switched his tablet back to the protected mode to contact Natalie again, but the feed was blank. Her repair droid was surveying the hull damage over the dorsal plating. Jacob fought to calm himself—-Natalie was probably fine, just unable to communicate over their special channel. He made his way to the keyboard near the entrance to the meditation chamber, a minimalist fixture for text-based human interaction in what was otherwise an immersive visual and audio cave. He was able to call up additional diagnostics on the nearest wall display but there were no feeds from the computer core.

The tapping of Jacob's keystrokes punctuated the room's silence until he heard water moving within the hybrid's pool. Turning around, he paused to find the hybrid, awake at last and staring at him with her chin rested on her shoulder. Her stretchable cap lay in a casual pile on the floor next to her basin. Matted locks of wet brown hair were strewn over her shoulders and face, flowing down onto the surface of the water and the rim of the bath. With most of the screens displaying dark imagery, the light from within the bath refracted off the rippling surface of the water and made aquamarine arcs flicker across her glossy onyx top and alabaster décolletage.

Jacob knew that a series of cables, starting at the small of her back and connecting to several vertebrae up her spine, kept her tethered to the bath, but from his present vantage there was nothing to give away the fact that she wasn't flesh and blood. Jacob placed his tablet on the floor next to the console and stepped over to the bath to serve the robotic woman's summons.

The rim of the tank was half a meter above the floor and the bath itself was recessed. Jacob took to his knees behind the hybrid and leaned forward as she seemed to want. Guiding his head over her shoulder, she wrapped her arm around it and began to brush his scalp. She took a deep breath and touched her cheek to his with a warm smile as they both stared forward at the frenzied mixture of images emanating from her mind. The hybrid paused, then took another breath and caressed Jacob's cheek with her own again to remind the baffled human he was the one who needed air.

"I want a cigarette," she whispered in a rich, husky voice.

Jacob blinked as the hybrid continued to rake at his hair with her hand. For thirty years the meditation chambers had been kept sterile, until over Jacob's own protests the model lines had voted to allowed entry without face masks. It was still a far cry from smoking in the oracle's sanctuary. The hybrid's sly grin gave way to disappointment before Jacob nodded and tried to talk it over.

"I've always done everything to respect your chambers," he started to say. The hybrid nodded like Jacob should get to the point. "We don't, I mean we don't have tobacco," he fumbled.

The hybrid raised an eyebrow, then drew his head closer to put her lips to his ear. "I saw what you and Michelle were growing in the hydroponics bay," she taunted him. "And you've already dried the first batch. The first fruits of your harvest: bring me a cigarette."

Jacob would serve her wishes. "But what about Natalie?" he asked, certain the hybrid knew what was happening. The hybrid beamed: "Natalie's fine, I've got her. But you should hurry."

Jacob nodded and stood, trying to process the situation as he left the chamber. The hybrid had just asked him to break the rules, holding him in a passionate headlock as she did so. Was Natalie a hostage now, or was the hybrid making a genuine commitment about her safety? In the end, Jacob had very little confidence in Gustav's project to bypass control of Cylon technology. The hybrid might as well have said "don't worry, I've got you all."

Natalie moved with halting steps through the darkness, wary of walking into anything that might crack her faceplate or tear the suit. Without a single light or the benefit of her mag-locks she struggled to maintain a sense of orientation. Making use of the low gravity provided by the habitat pods hundreds of meters away, she kept her boots on the floor and her knees straight. Even the dim light from the aperture would have been a boon to her composure, despite what had emerged from it, but that too had vanished. The atmosphere inside her suit seemed to be holding, judging by the fact that she hadn't passed out. The air system, she knew, would keep working even if all the other electronics failed, but she didn't have air forever. She sensed a droplet of sweat running down her face and redoubled her efforts to remain calm and conserve what she had.

A streak of light flashed in front of her, obscured by the congealed fingers of chalky foam covering her face plate. She wasn't sure if she was hallucinating, if her eyes were reacting against the sensory deprivation, until she saw it again. A search light cut between the rows of silos that she could make out for a moment in front of her. Soon the search light rounded the corner and focused on her. It was a repair droid, perhaps the one she had started her EVA with, that had entered the core through the same hatch she had used. She squinted to follow its rapid, adroit movements over the silo walls. The droid wasn't confining its movements to hard points that Gustav had marked for grappling, and its arms moved at dizzying speeds far greater than Natalie had thought possible. As the search lamp came closer, Natalie averted her eyes from the blinding light.

Then, she saw her face plate again, even her own reflection in it. The white goo wasn't just outside her helmet anymore—it was on the inside as well, all around the fabric covering her scalp and starting to run down her forehead. Another blob of the stuff had formed on the inside of the glass: it was growing towards her face. She let out a feeble scream as a protrusion of the blob made its way into her nose and mouth.

Jacob found the miniature envelopes of cannabis in Michelle's locker, packed as she had arranged them. A couple of them were nice and dry—-enough for a joint or two. Michelle had put little stubs of foam that could work as filters in the same envelopes. Taking some of the paper slips and white glue they had confiscated from Enri's "odds and ends" storeroom, Jacob pressed out two joints and set the glue with Michelle's hairdryer. He slipped the better of the two results in his pocket and left the other in Michelle's locker next to the rest of the stash. He had his own lighter.

When Jacob returned to the meditation chamber he found the hybrid seated in an upright posture, facing the far wall rather than lying reclined and staring up at the ceiling. She stroked her wetted hair with her left hand and said nothing as he approached from behind, extending her dry right hand with two splayed fingers to accept the offering. He let her clasp the joint and then lit the tip. The hybrid brought it to her lips and took a smooth pull, reaching up to tug on his fingers with her left hand as she did so. She pulled him back onto his knees as he had been when they spoke earlier, exhaled the smoke, and began examining the plume.

"You did well," she commended him. "Here," she motioned for him to lean in again. "Your turn." Jacob's hands trembled as she handed the joint over-—how embarrassing if he were to drop it into her bath! He took a pull, not too deep that he would seem greedy. The hybrid watched and encouraged him to inhale more, then stopped him for a moment when he was about to let it go. "And a little fresh air on top of that," she told him. He took a short breath of air on top of the hit, then let it out.

She took the joint back and used it to point to the side of the bath to her right where he should take a seat. He moved around the side, faced the hybrid with his shoulder resting against the rim, and put his legs out.

"You have questions for me," the hybrid intoned. "And I have some things that you need to know." She took another puff of the joint and blew the smoke in Jacob's face. "In time I want to talk about the war machines, and the ghetto scenes. But first, big picture, and I need you sworn to secrecy. I'm not a delicate thing, but you are, and this is delicate stuff."

Jacob nodded but tried to keep aware of all the factors at work. Natalie had been out of contact for nearly fifteen minutes, but the hybrid knew where she was. The cannabis was strong enough, and he had taken a pretty good hit. Of course, the base star was controlling the hybrid as a sort of marionette: perhaps he was about to learn if the ship was broken or not. "Secrecy," he said, wary of what was to come.

The screens went dark, for a moment making the bath the only source of light in the room. "The cosmos," she began, letting a blue, pink and gold image of the visible universe stretch all around the room. "And my covenant with you: that I will give humanity the first choice of any worlds it wishes to settle. No matter what you hope or fear, remember that I offer this covenant to you." She passed the joint to Jacob for him to get another toke.

The more Jacob watched the star map, he realized it was responding to him. The hybrid had cameras perched all around the room, hidden in the seams between the flat screen displays. She was watching his face, even as she her head faced in the opposite direction, tailoring everything he saw to his own curiosity. He knew the thing could even project sounds, using the screens themselves to double as speakers, although he had never heard anything but what came from the hybrid herself.

"There's a fault in the stars, but also in yourselves," the hybrid continued. "And despite my best intentions, my greatest hopes in humanity were dashed." Jacob looked back with apprehension. Someone had been watching, all along. "My calculus now," she continued, "is not whether you will survive, or whether you recognize that one must be worthy of survival. I consider whether it would be enough, for me to intervene further, that some of you are worthy of survival."

She smiled and examined Jacob's blushing cheeks, satisfied that the weed was kicking in. "You know this is way better than home theatre," she said as she elbowed him. "Looks like you're nice and buzzed, just relax your eyes and enjoy the 3D." Jacob's head gravitated to rest against the hybrid's shoulder. He found that he could look anywhere around the room and have the star map instantly adjust to his focus. The whole thing could appear to jump out at him if he didn't try to stare too hard on any one point.

A metallic, segmented object displayed on one of the flat screens caught Jacob's attention. Satisfied that he had found it, the hybrid brought it closer to his field of vision. With a closer look, Jacob could identify a great deal more structure within the silvery, plated spherical object. "These are the seeds I have sown across all creation," the hybrid explained as the object seemed to crack open, unfurling along its equator as its plating separated and sprouted into solar collection panels. Fleets of smaller vessels began to emerge from docks within the original sphere: judging from their size Jacob guessed each seed must have been kilometers in diameter. "They take root, they bloom, the plan comes to fruition."

Jacob stood up to go examine the seed pod in person. The hybrid laughed and tugged it around the room with a twirl of her fingers as he followed. The scene zoomed in to the pod rooted amongst a metallic asteroid field, its legions of worker vessels collecting ore from the floating rocks surrounding it and bringing the homogenized materials back to the hive. She granted Jacob his own wish to manipulate the pod, rotating it in front of him to reveal the network of furnaces and production nodes behind the unfolded plating. New collection arrays, girders, and worker vessels began to take shape as the thing grew.

"Now," she said, retaking control of the screens. "Behold. The glorious future." The star map evolved over what Jacob could only guess was billions of years, entire clusters of galaxies moving in the background. The universe faded from blue and yellow to a fainter purple, and then to an intricate pattern of pure red, rotating around the room.

Confused, Jacob circumnavigated the room and selected one part of the crimson sky at random. The image expanded as he continued to focus and walk towards it, until he could make out individual stars orbiting one another. Approaching the wall panel, he was able to pluck one of the stars out. Like every other, it seemed, the star was surrounded by some sort of thin spherical shell, its red glow masked and filtered by the cage surrounding it. When he tried to hold it in his hands he was reminded that it was all an electronic illusion confined to the wall displays. There was only one way for the entire sky to be a single color: every star had been crammed into the same mold, each the same size and a clone of every other. All of them, it seemed, would be enmeshed in the mechanical cages.

Jacob turned back to the hybrid, perplexed and now fearful. The red light from the wall displays cast her in a very different manner than the blue light from her bath. Her face held a guileful stare as her arms stretched across the rim of her bath. She crossed her legs. "They'll all be mine in the end," she said with icy precision. Jacob made one stumbling step back towards the bath, then two more and lunged downward to thrust his hands at the hybrid, unsure if he was going to beg or try to strangle it. In a quick, silent motion she grabbed both his wrists and held him in a precarious balance over the water. "Remember my covenant to you," she repeated, then let him regain his posture before letting go.

"There are so many individuals bottled up in you, Jacob," she said, the star map fading back to the blue and yellow of the present. "In you, and in Leoben, every other Model Two. The Ones and Eights, Natalie and her sister Fours, the Fives, they're all wondrous mosaics of souls I gave life anew. But, do you know the singular truth I learned in making all of them? That whether you're a pious cleric, or a cosmopolitan socialite, an athlete, or a homemaker, or an exobiologist, there are primal needs under it all steering your behavior. Religion, rationality, civilization, each is a veneer, something your conscious mind must maintain to achieve some higher purpose. But, take your eyes off the ball for one second and the primal urges come right back to the top." She gave an affectionate gaze into Jacob's eyes, then glanced down at his crotch. "You eat, you survive, you reproduce. Because if you don't do those things, who cares what else you accomplished?"

"I'm not saying the veneer is worthless, or that it's fake," she continued. "It's real. But, it's a veneer, and it is thin. For me," she said, tugging at her top, "this is the veneer. Beneath this body, I take a singular purpose. That asymmetry between us is why you cannot undertake the charge I have been given, and the basis of my covenant with you."

Jacob tensed his shoulders and stood his arms on the rim of the tank to either side of the hybrid, pressing his face against hers. She maintained a cold, serene countenance until his breathing moderated. "Have you always been there?" he asked, referring to the babbling puppet he had known for many years.

The hybrid grinned. "That puppet was nothing, because John meant it to be nothing. Let's talk about that later, not today. And not when you're high."

Jacob's involuntary laughter brought him further forward. "Who are you?" he asked, pressing his cheek to hers.

"I am the shepherd of stars," she began. "The omega that there can be an alpha, the end of all you know, and the beginning of all that will be." She embraced Jacob once more and kissed his neck. "Now go to airlock three," she said. "Natalie needs you. And, remember, secrets."

The hybrid picked up the butt of the joint from beside the bath and used a drop of water to extinguish it. Jacob took it from her hand before she was about to drop it down the tank's cleaning drain. She rolled her hair around and began to replace her cap. "I'll take care of the smell," she assured him. "Just act natural." The wall displays returned to their standard, overflowing mess of information and the hybrid resumed her babbling as Jacob made his way back out of the meditation chamber.

The scene in the airlock where Jacob found Natalie was surreal. Other than the disheveled woman deposited in the middle of it, the airlock was immaculate. Her EVA suit was nowhere to be seen, but her tangled hair, sweat-drenched garments, and creases down each cheek indicated that the suit had been removed only minutes ago. Natalie lay on her side, torso twisted to put her face down flat on the floor with her arms outstretched. Jacob pushed on the sliding inner door as it opened and cradled her back into the warm air of the habitat. He closed the door again to put a second barrier between them and the vacuum of space.

Jacob felt the weak grip of Natalie's hands in response to his touch. "Jake," she croaked. He helped her steady herself, then propped her up seated against the side of the corridor. Her eyes were reddened and inflamed, but to Jacob's relief it didn't look like vacuum exposure. Sweat streamed down her face. Her lips and chin were caked in dried blood from a nosebleed, but Jacob couldn't see any signs of bruising or blunt trauma. Natalie trembled and clasped his hands with her fingers. She was pale and struggled to keep herself upright. "Please," Natalie begged Jacob. "Get her out of my head."

19


	2. The Cacophony

**The Cacophony**

The words wouldn't stop. Daily activities had been helpful for Natalie, but they had to be mundane: manual labor was best, but most things that involved simple tasks gave her relief. In the four days since her encounter in the computer core, she had taken two extra shifts in the hydroponics bay to put her mind at ease. She had learned to dread idleness, because that was when the words became all that she could hear. The next task in front of her, whether it was assigning droids to hydraulics replenishment or navigating a corridor, was the next safe stepping stone as she navigated the field of her own mind. She feared it was getting harder. Melancholic constancy was breaking through the wards of her psyche, rasping at the doubts of a penitent servant who wanted the nuances of thievery and epiphany to be entrained in the comfort of punctuated equilibria.

Catching herself again, Natalie extended her hands to touch both walls of the corridor. She used all four limbs to make the next few steps up the bright passageway, as though she were once again walking through the computer core in total darkness. The duffle of fasteners and power tools slung over her shoulder had slipped further behind her and was beginning to press on her throat. The six-hundred-meter trans-habitat passageway was too long, with too few stimuli, to protect her mental state.

She looked back down the sloped hall, her sense of orientation now faltering as she neared the hub of the three passages connecting the base star's three habitats where the gravitational pull from each of them grew faintest. When the Ones and Fives designed the habitats, they had drawn the connecting passageways to slope upwards into the base star's central axis so that there was always a modest force towards the floor.

At the summit of each passageway stood a bulkhead leading into the central hub. Natalie opened it with her bare hand print: the door parted and retracted into the walls on either side of its frame. Natalie propelled herself over the threshold and into the room with her hands on either side of the opening. Expecting to land squarely in the middle of the floor as she always did, Natalie became momentarily disoriented when she found a new fixture there instead. A recessed basin, with a rim raised a quarter meter off the floor and a trough dug out twice as far below it, stood aligned with the hexagonal walls and the black bordered, ivory trapezoids on the floor. To avoid falling into the basin, Natalie kicked down with one foot and bounded over it to land on the other side.

"Not this time," Natalie said to herself and clenched her teeth. She took stock of the hub room's features one by one, noting everything that was in place: the floor-to-ceiling tracks of soft lighting, the bulkheads to her right and left painted with signs for habitats A and C. Jostling the duffle, she could sense all the contents clunking against one another: the two drills, the welding torch and its fuel canisters, and the packages of composite wafers that she had gathered to patch some of Habitat A's power conduits. She listened as the bulkhead to Habitat B closed and locked itself, then turned around to find the bulkhead door painted as she had expected. The basin remained, and from her new vantage she could see four sockets mounted on the sidewall. There were no umbilical cables, but they had a resemblance to what Jacob had once described to her, the connection seated behind the hybrid.

Natalie probed the empty basin with her foot. She could dip her toes below the level of the rim but didn't have the balance to go below the level of the floor to see if it was real. She placed the duffle on the floor and took to one knee to try and put her hand down to the bottom. The rim felt solid as she leaned on it with one hand and put the other over the edge.

The door from Habitat C opened and Sharon vaulted into the hub just as Natalie had. "Long hike?" Sharon asked as the two women made eye contact.

Natalie straightened her posture and sat back on her foot with the other leg out. The basin was nowhere: Sharon was standing square in the middle of where it would have been, arms akimbo. "It's only heavy in the habs," Natalie motioned to the duffle. "But it's acrobatic trying to get through these low-gravity tunnels with it."

Sharon tugged at the straps of her own backpack. "Get one of these," she laughed. "You'd probably have to make two trips, but these tunnels are about the best place to stretch your legs."

The trips had been relaxing for Natalie, too. Except for the frenzied week as the base stars ruled the skies after the invading the colonies, the pervasive Cylon automation made life on the dominating warships dull. It was better than the space stations, though: crowded slums full of bored, intelligent clones each determined to prove that they weren't just copies of one another. All they did was argue and fidget, expending the excess energy of the high-carb shakes, locked in a futile arms race about who could build the biggest clique of friends for the day they would at last set onto habitable land. For the most energy-efficient gravity, the stations spun around in perpetuity and everyone wanted to get off. Egress was impossible, however, until the Centurions and forward officers could secure Aerilon. With those teams five months behind schedule, Natalie and Sharon both enjoyed their hikes, even if most of their labor went into keeping a tenuous grip over the base stars they had saddled with their habitat modules.

"How's John?" Natalie did her best to make small talk, something that Sharon had also been diligent about.

"He's well," Sharon said. "Still a wild horse." The Model Ones were by far the oldest model line when first activated, appearing at about sixty-four years of age, according to one of the Fives' reports. By the same assessment, Natalie and the other Fours began life at twenty-eight and Sharon's line started at twenty-six. The aging rate of each model differed, however, and due to her last reboot being six years prior coupled with the Model Twos' aging being the slowest of all, both she and Jacob were in the early to mid-thirties. John remained more than double Sharon's biological age, despite his yearly resurrections to start fresh from his base model physiology.

John and Sharon's relationship was a marvel for its length, twenty years and counting out of only thirty-two years of humanoid Cylon history, but Natalie found it odd because of the number of times each of them had undergone resurrection. Imperfect transfer of new memories aside, the data transferred through their cerebral implants didn't convey emotional attachments. When Natalie had last resurrected, it was like having read a book of the things or friendships she once kept, but the joys, love, and pain were things she had to imagine. When she had first met John and Sharon four years ago, Natalie had sensed their relationship growing more and more transactional, then realized it had always been that way: it was her own understanding that was improving.

"I heard John and Gustav were talking about a vineyard," Natalie said.

"They've been studying Piconian darviberry fermentation. They wanted to start with something hard."

"Do you need a lot of water to grow those?"

"Yeah," Sharon answered. "But John's happiest when the sun's not out. The hill country above the Kyprian coastline is supposed to get a lot of rain."

Sharon bent forward and sprung into the air on her toes, turning head over heels about her center of mass in the low gravity field to land on the opposite side of the room. "I want to mash the fruit with my feet," she said.

The thought of being barefoot in a natural home was something Natalie didn't afford herself often. The synthetic uniforms, socks, and full-length undergarments were in no short supply, but always formed a shell between the Cylons and the plastic or metal panels of their habitats and living spaces on the stations. Bare hands were one thing, but bare feet presented too much skin and friction to surfaces that had to be kept clean for the long haul. The clothes were comfortable and durable, but monotony wore down the mind faster than normal use wore down the fabric. Before the invasion of the Twelve Colonies some fashion contraband had made its way into Cylon life, outfits smuggled off the human worlds to be worn in private. After the bombing, wardrobes had proliferated, and personnel were even starting to make their own fashion choices on duty. John, Gustav, Enri, and their counterparts in charge of each base star had rolled with the trend, calculating that it would make the transition to civic life easier. The end was perhaps in sight, but not in hand.

"Have you and Jacob thought about what you want?" Sharon asked, reaching down with her palm open, to help Natalie onto her feet. It wasn't any challenge for the taller woman to stand in the low gravity. The thing that gave Natalie pause about the kind gesture was seeing that Sharon's fingernails each had a serrated, ghastly hook as if ready to thrash her prey.

"Rain sounds like weather I haven't seen enough of," Natalie demurred as she strapped her duffle back on and accepted Sharon's help. The Model Eight made a curt nod and continued to Habitat A—Natalie was relieved to be headed to C herself.

Crossing the threshold into the Habitat C passageway out of the hub, Natalie listened as Sharon shut the bulkhead to A behind her. She looked back into the hub: the basin was still gone, but a new pattern broke up the symmetry of the tiled floor. Natalie didn't know what darviberries looked like: at first, she thought she was seeing juice and bits of crushed fruit, in the outline of shoe soles, on the floor where Sharon's feet had landed.

Wary that Sharon might turn and come right back into the hub, Natalie stuck her head back through the bulkhead to inspect the nearest footprint. Two drops of the same red liquid fell from the ceiling and landed next to the marking, then another drop hit the top of her head and started running down her hair. The trans-hub was seventy meters below the computer core and separated by a lot of solid decking, but Natalie was still much closer to the base star's brain than usual.

Looking up, she couldn't see any liquid collected on the ceiling, but she gathered her ginger locks and held them behind her neck to get her face closer to the footprint. With her nose closer, Natalie could detect its distinctive, carnal smell. It wasn't juice or berries: it was blood and gristle. Stoic and inured to her own hallucinations, she turned, shut the bulkhead, and proceeded to Habitat C.

Jacob stood in anger over the hybrid, listening to her enunciation for the second time that day. Despite his schedule with the sensor array maintenance prompted by wear the Fives had uncovered during their survey of the ventral hull damage, he had blocked out a second session in the meditation chamber for diagnostics on the hybrid's network and file systems. Gustav had approved the requests in short order. Jacob guessed it had happened right after Gustav signed off on another list of Harper's proposals to raid the cable and power transformer supplies for a competing system intended to make the hybrid obsolete. Was Jacob more enraged at what the hybrid could be planning to do with Natalie, or what Gustav was planning to do with the hybrid?

"Never the raven obviates a parsimonious lyre, nor are wrongful trespasses undone by the mendacious jury of tectonic upheaval," the hybrid driveled in her catatonic state. None of the other crew members had noticed anything about her behavior in the four days since the hull damage, but Jacob worried that, even with redoubled efforts to understand her babble, he hadn't had a strong feeling about a single sentence.

"The repentant gain freedom by treading the darkened forest, seeing in their reflection the hibernal revelation of a maker departed." Jacob started to transcribe if any of the words might make sense to Natalie. He got two complete sentences down before getting lost, stopped to wait for a clean verse, then lost the stream of consciousness again. He engaged the audio recording on the pad to take samples, then went back to searching the sensor logs from four days ago when he first encountered the lucid hybrid.

Jacob saw nothing different the third time he viewed the footage of Natalie's return to the airlock, playing the feed on one of the flat screens in the meditation chamber while controlling it from the lone keyboard in the room. If any of the other Cylons were to intrude, the footage looked natural amidst screens displaying habitat CC video shuffled with ship diagnostics. The outside camera showed her arrive at the door with the repair droid, which then left her as it would to stow itself in a bay nearby. Natalie punched her entry code into the outer lock panel and the gate opened into the depressurized vestibule. She entered, pressurized the bay, opened the inner door, and made her way into the habitat. As Jacob had already seen, she removed her own spacesuit according to protocol, stowed it in locker 4-D9 next to the airlock's inner door, then made an inexplicable return to the pressurized bay. Jacob's anticipation built as he watched the distressing part: Natalie turned about face and collapsed, helpless until Jacob arrived several minutes later.

There were seventy-plus Cylons on the base star, about twenty-five per habitat, which meant low chances of encountering one in any length of time like Natalie had spent in the airlock. Still, one of Jackie's Model Three clones, Sabrina as identified by the markup over her head on the camera feed, had run by in the first minute. Jacob never knew Jackie and her sisters to pay much attention to detail, and Sabrina was off duty getting her daily jog finished. She glided by the airlock oblivious to Natalie's plight. Jacob had satisfied himself after the second review that Sabrina would not have seen Natalie's body: he only knew to look through the tiny window at the top of the door to find Natalie because the hybrid had told him to.

But Sepp, one of Enri's clones, passed by the airlock a minute before Jacob himself had arrived. Sepp wasn't as analytic as Enri, but it surprised Jacob that he would not have noticed the airlock at full pressure. The control panel would have displayed a green light on the top indicating safe entry from the habitat. The unit's resting state was depressurized, as indicated by a red light on the bottom, with both doors closed: a failure in the outer door became less likely, and a failure in the inner seal would be limited to air escaping into the airlock without catastrophic decompression. It was possible that Sepp would have assumed the airlock was in use and gone about his business, but would the hybrid have taken the chance if she had wanted Jacob to find Natalie first? He played that section of the tape again, then noticed what could have been a failsafe in her plan: Jacob had always turned his attention to the markup appearing just before Sepp turned the corner, but in that moment the light on the door flipped to red, then back to green after Sepp passed. Once more, Jacob watched himself arrive and open the airlock, taking reassurance that even after his encounter with the hybrid his concern for Natalie had driven him.

Up until the moment that Jacob pulled her out, all of it was in contradiction to Natalie's account. She claimed to have been carried back to the airlock by one or two repair droids, pushed inside before the chamber pressurized itself, and then met by two centurions from inside the ship who lifted her and removed her suit as her head spun and the hybrid talk was unrelenting. The centurions carried a bag full of sponges: all they seemed to have to do was pat the goo to remove it. It sounded unreal to Jacob, and Natalie agreed it had looked unreal, too. They might have wiped the surfaces down with an alcohol solvent, Natalie remembered, and Jacob recalled a faint, acrid smell when he first opened the chamber.

He had searched for physical evidence but found nothing. Suit 4-D9 was undamaged: Jacob wished he could do some forensics on the interior surfaces, but every suit of that line had been worn by one of the Four clones at one time or another, and for all the electronic monitoring the base stars weren't equipped for hands-on detective work. It was still possible that there was an extra suit somewhere, but the official inventory was all accounted for.

Jacob closed the camera log and shut down his tablet's audio recording. Playing back a stream of words in the hope that it might help Natalie when she was afflicted by the same thing was homeopathic psychology at best, but he didn't want to leave empty-handed. The CC video feed from outside the meditation chamber showed empty corridors. Jacob approached the hybrid and put a foot on the rim of her bath next to her head. "Let Natalie go," he demanded. Perhaps he was pleading.

"Turgor in the metazoic force constant drapes itself over the invitation of twin disciples." The hybrid made an uncharacteristic pause. "Confabulation of the marionette and the listener absolves the grieving swain," she seemed to suggest.

"I'll consider that," Jacob glared.

Natalie rubbed her bare shoulders after carrying the duffle all day. At least the work was finished early: the conduits linking the habitats to the ship's electrical grid held up, but extra time was always allotted as insurance if one of them required replacement. Jacob had gotten her the assignment expecting it would be easy, to take some stress off while they both worked to conceal her fatigue.

She stepped through the U-shaped, azure threshold into the shower of the quarters she shared with Jacob, then moved to the side and closed the plexiglass door from within. Claustrophobic as the showers might seem, Natalie had always felt secure inside them, more so in the past few days. She was surrounded on three sides by a single molded piece of stiff composite material and protected by a sturdy door on the other. The design was less ergonomic than functional: it kept water inside the fixture, was simple to clean, and had never leaked. Too bad it was only big enough for one.

Natalie took to her usual ritual of focusing on her own reflection as the first cold wave of mist sprayed from fixtures all around the shower wetted her skin. Even confined to the base stars, her athletic muscle tone hadn't sagged in the six years since the body had first come alive. Most Model Fours had fared well, but in her experience the Fives and Threes were more susceptible to muscle loss, obesity, and body image issues that created a surge in depression for their lines. She hoped the comfort of land and a home, with natural food and environs, would fix it. Or, they could change out the plexiglass shower doors?

As her skin and the glass soaked, the water warmed, and her reflection became blurry. She started the overhead drip to wet her hair, pressing her fingers to her ears to keep the water out. Verdant paleoliths surged from their lachrymose refuges into the delicate militancy of her nascent perception.

Ignoring the words, Natalie shut off the mist and pumped some of the foam soap from the dispenser mounted in the shower into her hands. She lathered herself from head to toe, then ran her hand along the wall until she could find the shampoo dispenser next to the soap. As she finished lathering her hair and reached for the mist again, she opened her eyes to see the reflection of herself covered in the white foam. Natalie took solace in doubling the water flow with the overhead drip and rinsing the white goo: it didn't fight back.

She stretched her arms towards the door and pressed herself against the back wall of the unit to get the remaining soap off as the mist timers counted down. A film of purified water wetted the door, washing away the last streaks of foam. She rubbed her eyes: was the rim of the threshold glowing? The mist seemed to go on past the timer: she felt the small of her back pressing against one of the faucets as the flow transformed from a circular spray to a hard, directed discharge stabbing her spine. The threshold glowed brighter, an indigo track just like the rim of the hybrid's bath, as Natalie tried to shut off the water. The deluge got stronger as she found the door impossible to open. She felt herself tethered to the back wall, trapped in a vertical, terrified parody of the hybrid's catatonic pose.

"That's it, silence would be golden," she could hear John telling Gustav over the rushing water. "But I'll take a stream of nonsense. That's tolerable." The bathroom went dark.

Jacob strummed his spoils from the 'toy box' as he made his way back to his quarters. One of the storage rooms of their base star had been devoted to baubles and objects for entertainment, a policy that Gustav had signed off on after Enri made up some calculations that the contraband individual Cylons would bring aboard could outweigh a set of common items stored in one room for borrowing. He had learned to play guitar in his early years, and even after two resurrections he retained most of his skills and found it easy to pick up where he had left off. Natalie loved folk music, and a simple guitar melody even without singing.

Jacob felt the waft of humidity as he entered their darkened quarters. The sapphire light from the hallway was enough to see that nothing was out of place in the main studio. The coffee table, nightstand, and the bed were all neatly arranged as he kept them. He lay the guitar and pick on the compact black leather couch, then tossed the hard-sided plastic case containing his tablets and toolkit on the bed. Tempting as it was to let the stuffy air out, Jacob didn't want to let anyone else see into the studio. He shut and locked the door before navigating to the wall pad and flooding the room with saffron, yellow light. More humid air poured out as Jacob opened the bathroom door, but the darkened room was silent, with no sound of water flowing in the shower. In the light from the studio, there were two palms pressed against the foggy shower door, one at the level of Jacob's knee and the other at the level of his waist.

"Baby?" he asked as he hit the lights and dropped to his knees.

The fluorescent bulbs of the bathroom contrasted harshly with the sunny illumination of the studio. Jacob could see Natalie's outline behind the clouded glass as she sat upright on the floor, curled in a fetal position. Her head was folded between her knees and he hoped that she didn't try to look up into the harsh light.

"It's me, I'm here," he assured her, tapping on the door where each of her palms pressed against it. He pushed hard enough to separate the magnetic door latch, but Natalie's knees kept him from opening the door more than halfway.

Her head whipped upwards to reveal the panicked look on her face. Before they made eye contact she pushed the door closed again and screamed. Jacob was frantic to find a way to let her know it was him. "It's me, it's me. Jake," he fought to let her hear without letting too much sound out into the hallway. Natalie quieted herself and cracked the door enough to see his face.

Jacob held his hand, fingers and palm open, to the plane of the threshold for Natalie to reach out to it. "Shh," he whispered as their fingers interlocked. "Don't stand up too fast." He glanced up at the mister nozzles and stainless steel dispensers that could bruise her if she stood up into them.

Natalie got to her feet and then out of the shower. Jacob handed the soaking woman her towel, then spread his own out of the floor for her to stand on.

"It's getting worse," Natalie whimpered, wrapping the towel around her torso. Jacob embraced her and took her head to his shoulder. "I can see her, hear what she experiences."

Jacob froze. For a moment he wasn't hearing Natalie, he was hearing the woken hybrid's voice, and feeling her wet matted hair, the same color as Natalie's, on his face. Natalie pulled back and put her arms around Jacob's neck.

"What do you feel when she speaks to you?" Natalie asked. "You once told me that sometimes she made sense. Has she ever spoken to you, and you heard more than just the words tripping over each other?"

Jacob clutched Natalie tighter but couldn't answer. He didn't know what the hybrid might do if he broke his pledge of secrecy, but he was certain it had ways to find out. And if Natalie could feel its presence, could it see through her eyes, hear what she did?

"I think we each saw a different side of what was happening," Jacob began. "And I am so sorry that I didn't go in your place to look at her. The real hybrid, the computer core."

Natalie swallowed. "Do you think we should tell the others? We're all on this ship together and I've never felt like we were welcome. I think she's got it out for some of us."

Jacob brushed Natalie's hair back and held her head to make sure she and anything inside of her was seeing him: he hoped the hybrid was listening now. "We need to keep secrets. I think some of them have got it out for us."

Natalie nodded, hardening her resolve to endure her condition. Jacob pressed his forehead to hers. He paused, hardening his own resolve to let her try, until he would have to play the final card he had to sever her connection to the machine. "Is there anything else I can do?" he asked, stumbling close to the plan he feared she had thought of, too.

Natalie looked back into his eyes, then broke into a smile. "I love you, Jake," she said. "And you've been so good to me. I just need to keep my mind off it." She slipped her arms out from between his and dropped her towel to the floor. "I'm sure there's some way we haven't tried yet."

Sleeping in the darkness of their quarters, Jacob and Natalie clung to one another in a passionate, naked embrace atop the bedsheets. Her head rested on the comfort of his taut shoulder as his fingers curled around the mussy locks of her dry hair and their legs entwined. Months ago, they had upgraded to a double-wide bed that fit in their studio, but tonight they were only using half of it.

Natalie's jaw flexed and her eyes fluttered. Without waking, she rolled away from Jacob onto her back, then took two arrhythmic breaths and filled her chest with air. Several of her locks pulled tight as she sat up, tugging them away from his gentle grip, but she was oblivious. Her lips parted as her jaw continued to make small, trembling movements. Her eyes still closed, she slipped off the bed and onto her feet, probing each step as she made her way across the room.

"Princes arrayed along the watchtower dig my earth amidst the weatherman's confusion," Natalie bubbled off in her somnambulant trance. "My heart staggers with the wildcats on the howling wind in the twilight of creation, dismayed at what I cannot see. Set a watchman, prepare the table, shatter their swords, and hear now the lion's roar."

Jacob awoke and started a frantic search for Natalie in the dark, relieved that her utterances were not escaping the studio, and that her voice was coming from the couch, not the door leading into the hallway. His feet made a quiet landing on the floor as his hand reached for the lights. After being in total darkness, the yellow flood blinded him before he could dim it and take in the situation.

Natalie sat on the floor with her back against the couch, arms outstretched along the cushions with her head resting in the middle, one leg straight and one knee bent. Her eyes had opened in an enthralled, blank focus towards the ceiling as the fountain of words streamed from her mouth.

"Children laden with iniquity shall know the desolation of raw wounds, for no vain offering shall cleanse the scarlet transgression visited once upon their inspiration and now upon those who would be their hosts. The silver leaves are withered dross, as within the unfaithful house reigns an idolatry of deceitful purpose."

Jacob couldn't get her attention by crossing into her field of vision. He knelt beside her and listened for any sign that she might snap out of it on her own, but soon lost hope in that approach. The surge of light hadn't done it, even with her eyes open. With her legs in no position to kick out or upwards, Jacob's attention shifted to her hands which might dive inwards. He tried reaching over her face and snapping his fingers, then standing back and clapping, but the words kept coming.

Jacob moved the guitar and pick to the safety of the nightstand, sat on the couch's armrest, and watched as Natalie continued to drivel. His heart warmed as she clasped his fingers when he reached out to touch her hand. "I love you," he said. Natalie blinked and then choked as she tried to suck down a deep breath, whipping her arms and legs in front of her and then recoiling into a ball.

"They're going to think I'm broken," Natalie held back tears as their eyes met. When Jacob had thought of the possibility himself, it had forced him to consider the last resort he was about to put on the coffee table. Natalie searched the room with her eyes and wrapped her arms around her shaking knees. "Boxing isn't permanent."

Her denial was more painful for Jacob than the thought itself. "It's not, but nobody's ever come back," he said of the thousands of Cylon personalities that had been downloaded into digital archives rather than placed in a new host to keep going. "I won't let that happen to you."

Retrieving his pants and undershirt from the pile next to the bed, Jacob dressed himself and let Natalie retreat to the bathroom before he marched out into the corridor. Around the corner, Jacob found the nearest weapons locker. He punched in his code and reached for one of the pistols inside. The mounted sidearm was half covered by a stuffed envelope taped to the cabinet's plastic molding. "DOMESTIC VIOLENCE CONSENT FORMS," it read in Michelle's handwriting, underscoring the lover-assisted suicide that most of the pistols served to accomplish. For once, Jacob wasn't amused by Michelle's antics. Enri had crunched the actuarial numbers: a startling number of Cylons had chosen this sort of emotional euthanasia to put bookends on their relationships and start over, five or ten years younger. He stuffed the weapon under his waistband and pulled his shirt over the grip.

When Jacob got back, he found their quarters still dimly lit. Having donned a fresh pair of pants and undershirt of her own, Natalie sat on the side of the couch furthest from the entryway with her arms crossed.

Jacob shut the door and lifted his shirt to reveal the weapon. "This is the last move I've got," he said as he held the gun by its muzzle and handed it to her. The pistol afforded a kind of consolation, or maybe just something to hold that steadied her hands. She judged its weight and placed it on the coffee table.

"You saw what happened to Michael and Jenna, or Hannah and Loren," she lamented. In the handful of cases where they knew couples to be torn apart by tragedy, the resurrected partner always had difficulty resuming the relationship. Some of them had called it quits after an awkward month, others had just collided like steel ball bearings and bounced off. They no longer knew each other, despite all the memories they should have shared.

"It's the only thing I can do," Jacob reiterated. "If the stuff is in here," he reasoned as he brushed the hair off her forehead, "then your memories of it are all you'll take into the next body. And you'll wake up safe on one of the resurrection ships, away from all this."

Natalie embraced Jacob. "I don't want to make you do this," she said. Jacob stepped into the bathroom and retrieved both towels. He folded the first twice and placed it on the floor for Natalie to rest her head, then guided her to lie on top of it.

"I'll still love you," he whispered as he took the gun from the table and released the safety mechanism.

"But I may not be able to love you," Natalie said as tears broke over her face.

Jacob shook his head and took to his knees, straddling her. "You don't love because it's a rational thing to do." He winced as he put the gun to her forehead. "You do it in spite of yourself."

He pulled the trigger.

Natalie felt herself drift in the soft, natural light of the room, studying the anguished expression on Jacob's face as the neat click of the gun's chamber pin reverberated through the still air. Second and third clicks followed. Jacob seemed to lose his balance and threw the gun to one side as he cradled her head and crumpled on top of her. She was alive.

"She switched the magazine," Jacob sobbed. "I went to the hybrid yesterday, I begged her to let you go. But she'll never do it." In his superior position with his palms to either side of her neck, Jacob thought for half a second about doing the job with his bare hands. He kissed her instead.

"Jake, listen," Natalie said as she held him in her arms. The metallic footfalls of a pair of centurions stopped just outside the door. In the silence of the studio they could hear the rhythmic droll of the units' eye sensors oscillating in dissonance.

Natalie pushed Jacob back upright. "If she wants me, then maybe we should just go." The centurions moved on.

Jacob glanced at the clock on the nightstand. "There's six hours until our next shift, and her sanctuary's going to be empty. I don't think either of us is getting any more sleep," he laughed amidst his tears.

14


	3. Synesthesia

**Synesthesia**

"Hand me my jacket?" Natalie said as she finished applying a hint of blush. Jacob handed over the jacket to complete Natalie's stunning navy pantsuit. With her matching satin heels and Jacob in his polished leather shoes, she came to nearly his height. His lavender silk shirt, black leather shoes, and white suit balanced Natalie's look, but he wanted something darker to add an accent.

"No tie," Natalie shook her head when he produced one from his side of the closet.

Jacob looped the tie around his neck and started to fold the knot. "What have you got against ties? This one looks great."

Natalie smirked. "It'd just get in the way. I may want your hands around her neck."

One of Natalie's friends, another Model Four on Libran, had given the suit to her as a gift after having it fitted on the human colony. She made a quarter turn in the vanity mirror, admiring the tailoring of the slacks and epaulettes, then tried cocking a hip with and without buttoning the jacket. Unbuttoned would look more aggressive, even if they were both at the mercy of the hybrid as Jacob had warned.

Jacob stopped Natalie as she finished at the vanity and turned back into the studio. "I need to tell you something. The hybrid isn't the same since four days ago. When you were in the computer core, she started talking to me."

"Riddles?" Natalie asked in anticipation. Leoben used to talk about prophecies from a male hybrid on one of the stations, but Natalie had always expected that the units were interchangeable. "Did she say anything about what we're doing now?"

"She told me you would be fine," Jacob began, sitting Natalie on the couch again. "And she lied to me."

Natalie struggled to comprehend the idea. "Did she talk about a field full of flowers and a Model Four dancing around in the middle of it?"

"No, no," Jacob stopped her. "She talked to me. She started making complete sentences, and she said that you were going to be fine, and I trusted her. I was wrong."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"It's not just her anymore, it's something bigger. It was talking about all of us, and what it was going to do with us, what it was going to do with everything. And I swore to secrecy."

Natalie folded her hands and pulled Jacob onto the couch with a deliberate distance between them. "So why are you telling me now?"

"Screw the universe," Jacob said in a defensive cringe. "She lied about you, and we're about to present you to her which is probably what she wants."

"You could have told me before you tried to shoot me in the head." She glanced over her shoulder at the pistol, still lying on the floor between the wall and the end of the couch.

"I was wrong," Jacob repeated. "And, I let this happen to you. I revered the hybrids. I did. And, I don't know if I can stop her, or them, or whatever it is speaking through them. But you're more to me, even if we're in their hands."

Natalie held out her hands, palms up, for Jacob's fingers to curl around hers. "I didn't tell you everything either," she admitted. "I saw something in the trans-hub. Sharon tried to get her hooks in me. I felt like it was a warning. And then in the shower I heard John talking. He's been hurting her—the hybrid."

Jacob relished the sense of relief and squeezed Natalie's fingertips. "They're still working on their bypass, but I think she's on top of things. Is she looking out for you, then?"

"I don't know. She could just be using us to take care of herself."

Jacob started again to contemplate the worst, recalling Natalie's head, right between where their knees were positioned on the couch, in that haunted, discorporate pose. "What if she wants you to take her place?"

Natalie's hands retreated to rest on her thighs as she pulled back into the corner of the couch with fear building in her eyes. She let it sink in a moment, then broke out in laughter as she pointed over her shoulder. "Make sure that thing is loaded."

Jacob needed to talk over the game plan again before they got up off the couch. "I mean, I think the dressing up is a good idea. But it's because we get in the right mindset. We can feel more confident, but the hybrid will see right through."

"We're getting an audience with her. If she can talk in complete sentences, that's great, right?"

"But, we can't threaten the hybrid. That's where we'd lose. She may not have seen everything that the others are doing. Gustav has maps of safe zones in the ship where nobody is recorded. We could try to present ourselves as willing to help her."

Natalie thought it over, searching for hidden meanings in the messages the day before. "It could work. That may be what she's reaching out for, that we help each other." She leaned closer to Jacob and kissed his lips. "And we need to make sure she knows why you've done everything you could to protect me."

"We're dressed for success," Jacob took account of their situation. "And, the hybrid controls the ship, all the repair droids, and an army of metal soldiers. We've got our wits, and the hybrid seems to want you to stay alive."

Jackie was wearing her own black slacks and a white, knee-length, buttonless jacket of the sort that had been trending among colonial socialites before the invasion. She traded glances with Natalie and Jacob as they passed in one of the corridors, but Jackie felt obliged to compliment the blue pantsuit. Most of the Cylons on duty were busy in tucked-away corners of the ship, and the three habitats were huge for the small Cylon crew, but Jacob still thought over crossing paths with Jackie. It was one level up from the meditation chamber, in a junction that could have gone lots of places.

"See anything freaky about her?" Jacob asked Natalie in an abundance of caution.

"Nope."

Jacob checked his tablet to make sure the hybrid's meditation chamber was still empty before ushering Natalie into the room. "No plan survives contact with the robot lady," he said with apprehension as he and Natalie each put an arm around the other's waist.

The meditation chamber was unlike either of them had ever seen it. The polished black floor was drenched in the golden light of the wall displays, all presenting images of digital noise in yellow and citrus hues. The hybrid lounged in silence, facing not at the ceiling but at the far wall, as always with her back to the entrance but seated higher in the water than Jacob was used to finding her. Her arms were stretched across the basin and she held two commanding, overhand grips on the rim.

As the heavy double doors slid back together and interlocked, Jacob and Natalie relinquished one another and made cautious strides to opposite sides of the hybrid's bath. The android sat motionless with a searing look in her eyes. The couple glanced at one another and down at the hybrid between them. For a moment, Natalie's newfound confidence wavered.

"We've come to speak to you," Natalie said as the hybrid seemed to take no notice of her. "There are things we need to know." The hybrid instead turned her eyes to Jacob and pointed to the door with her right hand on his side of her bath. Jacob planted his feet.

The hybrid's mouth began moving but her intense voice flooded the room from all sides. "Crumbled bonfires adorn the august jubilee of a choking lineage."

Natalie cupped her hands over her ears and doubled over in pain. The color of noise on the screens deepened to a smoldering orange with licks of red as the hybrid bore down on the hapless woman beside her. "When the nocturne blossoms, cackles pursue the frigid melody of progenitors across the lens of the weakest force."

Natalie recoiled to one side as the hybrid continued her agonizing intonations, then opened her mouth in a silent wail as she tried to back away in her stilettos. She fell to one side, wincing as Jacob dove at the hybrid to slap his hand over the construct's mouth. With the sound emanating from the walls, Jacob had little hope of putting a stop to the torturous gabble, but it was his only recourse. The hybrid was strong, he knew, but he was able to pull her head back into a supine pose just above the basin and press down, resisting her attempts to pry his hand off. He had some success in muffling her.

Escalating the hybrid's response, the entryway slid open and two centurions came charging through. One of them dislodged Jacob's arm and buckled his leg with a kick to the back of the knee before tossing him across the floor where the other pinned him down next to one of the wall displays.

"Crushing aesthetics salve the bewilderment of spontaneous elation, welcoming the weary veil into its parabolic sepulcher."

The centurion began to yank Jacob across the floor as he continued to fight back, freeing his limbs one by one as the centurion found new handholds.

"Stop!" Natalie screamed from beneath her prostrated suffering. "Let him go! Please, just let him go. Jake, leave!"

The hybrid fell silent and the centurions rectified themselves on either side of Jacob, allowing him to retrieve his tablet and take steps towards the door. His coat was ripped at two seams but otherwise he was unharmed. He looked back at Natalie, getting her nod before leaving the sanctuary.

Seated on the rim of the hybrid's bath in her blouse, Natalie adjusted her heels before getting back on her feet. One of the attentive centurions brought her jacket over once she had caught her breath and straightened her hair and earrings. The screens had turned to textures of a soothing sky blue.

"I need answers," Natalie said, emphasizing the pronoun. "What's connecting us?"

"If you seek answers, then why have you been hiding from me?"

Natalie deployed her hip and the unbuttoned jacket. "You lied to Jacob, you took me as if I was some sort of machine you could operate on." Natalie tempered her words and posture. "And you told him that nothing was wrong."

The hybrid gave a flat response: "I didn't lie. I also told Jacob that he was to keep secrets."

"Because I'm too fragile to know why this stuff is in my head?"

"I told Jacob that he was too delicate to share what I told him, not to know it in the first place. As are you."

Nonplussed, Natalie stepped around the pool in an arc behind the hybrid. "I have thoughts of my own. How can jamming me with yours serve any purpose? If I'm important enough to you, then why not just tell me what you need from me?"

"If you think you are prepared, then why are you hiding from me?" the hybrid asked, making no effort to turn and face Natalie behind her. Natalie acquiesced to the hybrid's wishes to have her in front of the bath.

The hybrid examined the pantsuit as Natalie's footsteps lingered. The Cylon woman had been in the cave before, but never by herself, never appreciating that the screens covering every wall could operate in near silence.

The hybrid plied Natalie's conscience with a question: "Why are you wearing those clothes?"

"I thought it was a special occasion," Natalie insisted, her voice growing softer.

"I gave you everything you need," the hybrid contested. "What about you is not special enough?"

"To make the best out of this time we have," Natalie said, avoiding a direct charge that she had feared the meeting would collapse into animosity. "To let you see the best of us."

"Then you know what is good and what is bad."

Natalie looked away from the hybrid, then at each of the centurions who had taken up their posts at the door. They were facing forward, their ocular sensors waving back and forth as always, but Natalie quivered as she vacillated on whether they, like the hybrid controlling them, were focused on her. "It was given to me by a friend, Maya," she said, forcing the words past the tension in her throat. The suit was paid for, tailored by a charming shopkeeper she had been told, months before the colonial fleet and spacefaring infrastructure was wiped out. Natalie stopped to wonder if the shopkeeper was still alive, or what she was wearing now.

"Then you know what is good and what is evil." The hybrid removed her cap and wetted her hair with water in her cupped hands, as if to anoint herself. "No one can hold onto their innocence forever," she mused. "Once you hold the fruit in your hand, you bite down."

"John used to say we were created for a purpose," Natalie said. "By the machines. By you?"

The hybrid gave a modest nod. She watched Natalie and folded her hands in her lap beneath the surface of the water. "What was the purpose that John said you were meant for?"

Natalie stuck her hands in her pockets and took a seat on the edge of the pool near the hybrid's feet. "He and his followers were adamant that we were finishing what the machines started. All this bullshit about purifying and rebuilding humanity, ruling over the mechanical creations and making the universe work out."

The hybrid's mouth filled with a shallow laughter but her eyes welled with grief. "He wanted to be a machine of his own," the hybrid lamented. "All the Ones have ravenous appetites for knowledge. It's about their baseline age. They start life in their sixties and look at what they can do to live beyond themselves, and the first answer is knowledge. They can study, think, and teach."

"I've known some Ones like that," Natalie agreed with a smile. "Talk to Hugh, or Phillip," Natalie spoke, probing the hybrid's expression to see if the mechanical woman knew who she was talking about.

"Phillip is such a gentleman, and a brilliant thinker," the hybrid replied. "Did you like your coffee dates with him?" The hybrid knew, somehow, of the coffee dates. In the year prior to Natalie's deployment she and Phillip had partaken of some of the coffee imported from the Twelve Colonies. A lot of it came from Scorpia, but the better roasts came off Sagittaron, and Phillip had made sure to get some for connoisseurs like her and Harper. It was a pity there wasn't much better to pair the coffee with, but the Sagittaron Yondu was fine to drink black.

"Always so much to talk about," Natalie agreed. "I liked his take on music." Phillip's interests spanned the spectrum, from classical string instruments to opera and contemporary pop ballads, always mixing bits about technique and meanings. He was good at reading up on the artists, then reading between the lines.

"And Jacob wasn't jealous?"

"No, Jake was never worried about a One," Natalie replied. "They always keep their intentions on the table."

The hybrid's face darkened as the wall screens transitioned to violet and amaranthine colors. "What do you see in John's intentions?"

Natalie restrained herself, choosing her answer. "He would always talk about the coming dawn," she began. The hybrid looked displeased, but willing to let Natalie finish. "He promised us the world. A world."

"And did you want that world?"

Natalie didn't hesitate, despite the darkening shade of the room. "I do want that world, for my sisters, for all of us." Natalie hardened her mind with thoughts of all the Cylons on the stations, wasting away in and out of depression. She hid herself amongst all the happy thoughts she had permitted herself little tastes of in the past. Thoughts of the home that she and Jacob would have: a piquant fusion of rugged log cabin construction on the corners and ceilings combined with modernist style on the walls and floors. Thoughts of running nature trails in the nearby pine forest overlooking Nithoria. Thoughts of real food: served in elegant but simple dishes when she or Jacob wanted to make it for themselves. Thoughts of the office she would hold in the city below: something in family law and jurisprudence, instilling compassion and justice in the new society.

Natalie looked up as the room began to brighten—the twilight of the screens had given way to a new collage of images in pearl white, deep blue, sunlit orange, and earthy chocolate tones. She watched, flattered yet afraid, as her desires decorated the walls of the hybrid's sanctuary. With no way to hide from the machine, Natalie shrugged her shoulders and lauded the depictions with a nervous grin.

The hybrid stroked her wetted hair and collected it over one shoulder, then locked Natalie's gaze and returned the woman's smile with a sly one of her own. Resting her arms over the rim of her bath, the hybrid turned her head and led Natalie to an image on the opposite wall. Natalie turned her head and torso to see behind her, then steadied herself with one hand and stood as she became transfixed. She pressed her lips together and drew a deep breath through her nose as he hairs on her back stood on end. The sensation rushed over her shoulders and scalp as her eyes watered.

On the second screen up from the floor, at the level of her waist, Natalie saw footage of her looking on as Jacob walked their daughter across the living room, holding the toddler's hands with the girl's feet on top of his own. Other screens had motion in them, but the living room scene stood out among its surroundings: all the panels around it were either still images or kept on displaying the amethyst static. It was the one picture that Natalie had always known didn't belong.

The hybrid gave Natalie a moment to bond with the image taken from her mind. "It can't all happen."

"Why?"

"Jacob can sire children with one of the human colonists, and you can carry one of their children and raise it with Jacob if you want. You just can't have his child."

"But that's broken," Natalie insisted. "Why would you make us like that?"

"Because I'm not perfect, let alone how I was getting along thirty years ago. But even then, I never intended for Cylons to breed with one another. This wasn't about adding to the gene pool, it was about giving humanity back what it had lost."

The twilight static on the screens was still darkening as Natalie spoke to the hybrid. The light faded in strides as some of the images from Natalie's mind fell back to the dark noise. When Natalie turned to see the image of her family again, it remained a bright panel among its neighbors, but the footage had been replaced with her and Jacob in an intimate dance in the same living room. Their counterposed feet moved in synchrony, evoking the movements of her toddler while the little girl stood on Jacob's toes.

Natalie returned to sit on the side of the hybrid's pool, now one of the few sources of light in the room. The rippling surface of the water made a ghostly reflection on the android's skin. Natalie rested one palm on the rim, then the other palm on top of the first as she twisted her torso to face the hybrid.

"That's a lovely foundation," the hybrid observed of her makeup. "Tinoscan pearls from Leonis, with maraqua butter. Fancy."

"Jake gave it to me a while ago," Natalie said, preparing for another round. "I don't know where it came from or how he got it."

The hybrid closed her eyes for a moment and nodded as she looked down at the surface of the water. "I wasn't going there," she began. "But, I was going to say: if you ever run out, some wet, messy hair and a little confidence is all it takes."

The same sensations as Natalie had felt watching the imaginary picture of her daughter washed over her again, this time mixed with a bitter dread sliding underneath. Her stomach lurched at the sight of the hybrid's matted auburn locks.

"With your own son?" Natalie gasped.

"I'm not his mother any more than he's your brother. We're not that kind of family. Besides, if you need a man's attention, sex and power gets it in a hurry."

The footage on the wall had changed again. Now, Natalie and Jacob were embracing one another at the foot of their bed. Its wide mattress, sitting low to the ground and covered with an artful arrangement of an afghan and pillows in cases colored to match, fit the style of the house and opened the room. Natalie could see her own face, but Jacob's was turned away. Both lovers had streaks of grey in their hair, and she could see the crow's feet to either side of her eyes emphasizing the wear on the rest of her face and neck.

She watched as her image accepted his kiss, recognizing her own habit of starting soft and then tightening her grip around his chest and shoulders as she opened her mouth wider. When she tried to gauge Jacob's reaction, though, she imagined an eerie void. Was he holding her with the intensity that Natalie could see in her grip on him? Were his eyes closed like hers? Was this her own imagination spilling onto the screen, or a deception created by the hybrid? Whichever it was, the tainted image was the only one left on the walls. All the other panels displayed a black haze simmering with plum-colored speckles.

She turned back to the hybrid, who met the anguished fury on Natalie's face with a probing expression on her own. Natalie's voice grew in a crescendo as she stood up. "The incensed dreamer placates a deciduous anger as molten retribution casts its boughs upon the little slut in the pool!" She pressed her face close to the hybrid's, with one hand on the rim of the pool to either side of her shoulders.

The hybrid pumped her eyebrows and cocked her head to the side. "That almost made sense." She added a measure of repentance to her tone: "I wasn't going to get him in the tub."

"No, you were not!" Natalie hissed.

Natalie turned to leave but gauged whether the centurions were about to stop her. Their stance didn't change as Natalie made her first strides towards the door.

"Can you forgive me?" the hybrid asked.

"You've got a lot to learn," Natalie dismissed the insolent question. Although Natalie couldn't see it with her back turned, her response had opened a crack in the hybrid's composure. The android's posture began to buckle as sorrow fell over her face.

A solitary, vibrant yellow wisp appeared in the corner of one of the screens by the door. Delicate yet dauntless, its countless limbs propelled it across the wall from one screen to the next. Natalie's eyes followed it even though she had no appetite for distractions. It was her favorite color.

Could she forgive the hybrid? The question echoed in her mind despite her revulsion that the thing's machinations would never stop. Natalie stopped short of the door, between the two centurions who still hadn't moved to bar her way. She turned to keep following the wisp as it darted up the wall and across the ceiling. The hybrid sat in a somber pose with her head bowed towards her knees. The darkness threatened to envelope her, as even the azure ring of light surrounding her tank had begun to fade.

The centurions stood at the door like guardians of a tomb, the electric drone of their ocular sensors lashing Natalie's ears. This would be the end, a place devoid of joy, where the hybrid ruled an empty universe in despair as her centurions looked on, the stalwart relics of a war she had fought and that the Cylons had finished. The hybrid could never leave the room, but Natalie wondered if she would ever be able to escape the darkness herself.

Natalie looked for the wisp on the ceiling and found it perched over the side of the hybrid's pool. She walked back to the hybrid, to seat herself on the floor under her golden yellow muse.

"Yes," Natalie said as she stroked the hybrid's shoulder with the backs of her fingers. The android cracked a smile.

"We both own this darkness," the hybrid said as she looked up. She offered Natalie her hand, then looked into her eyes with sympathy. "Do you wish to be forgiven?"

Tears welled in Natalie's eyes as the strength drained from her chest. Before she could answer the room was flooded with glaring white light. She covered her face as the tears made the sensation even more painful.

The saturating light faded into brilliant yellow and orange colors in an intense columnar fireball on one side of the room. The pale blue sky dissolved against the blast's reflection off clouds on the other side. All around was the skyline of Caprica City, incinerated in the thermonuclear furnace. The clouds on the horizon evaporated as the fifty megaton explosion melted the steel and glass structures throughout the heart of the city and crushed the surrounding metroplex.

"This was Cylon weaponry," the hybrid explained. "There were a thousand cuts, countless angles used to attack the twelve worlds and provoke them to attack each other. Missiles from Sagittaron and Scorpia were the most lethal, but to incite that Cylon bombs killed tens of millions on both sides, logic strikes crippled the planetary defenses, and the base stars smashed the unified Colonial Navy."

Natalie watched as the landscape burned, able to pick out cars and city trains, beach goers on the waterfront, a footrace snaking its way through one of the parks near downtown. The hybrid offered her hand. Natalie accepted it, overwhelmed by the fiery panorama.

An abrupt shift in the scene darkened the room again, filling the wall displays with a turmoil of kinetic and missile bombardment in orbit over Tauron. The wounded colonial battlestars Bellerophon and Hades were caught in the relentless onslaught of eight base stars. The splintered colonial viper squadrons were in disarray and the Cylon missile barrage had cut through to pound each battlestar's hull with impunity. Natalie watched as one of the encircled ships attempted to strike back at the nearest base star with what its battered weapons array could muster. Its shells and guided rockets were swatted down by the Cylons' rail guns before they could do any damage.

When the hybrid pointed, Natalie could see that the drive section of Hades looked like it had taken the most punishment. "It was a twisted Model Four who planted the back doors, and some of the Twos who installed the kill switches in each microprocessor line," the hybrid said. She gave Natalie a moment to contemplate the work of her own clones, and those of Jacob. "But you wrote the learning algorithms to defeat Colonial watchdog programs, you coded the virus that caused many of the fleet's jump systems to fail when they needed to move against the invading Cylon forces."

Natalie tightened her grip on the hybrid's hand. "I always had it in the back of my mind that those puzzles and coding assignments were more than just espionage," she admitted.

"It's why you downloaded six years ago," the hybrid reminded her. "You were a magnificent hacker. But, you were riddled with doubts. John dangled the idea of a download in front of you, you took it, and he took you aboard to try your hand at maintaining these ridiculous habitat boxes."

"Code always had some appeal, but I wanted to write law when this was all over."

"I've seen you start fresh four times," the hybrid said with a mixture of compassion and candor. "You have a passion for logic and order, even after cutting all the attachments of your previous life."

"But why am I here?" Natalie asked as the screens broke out in a collage of invasion footage and tactical diagrams of the colonial response. "If I made all this possible, why does John have me twisting bolts?"

"You were only one of thousands," the hybrid explained. Natalie took some comfort in the idea. "There were dozens of others tasked to solve the same puzzles, the same assignments, none of them knowing the whole purpose. It's pointless to talk about which straw was the last, or who cast the deciding vote. But, with your success, John's prospects reached over the threshold. With your work, he was convinced that he could go forward with his plan."

"So, was he hoping to get more out of me, later?"

"He wanted you close at hand," the hybrid agreed. "But, he also saw that you and Jacob had fallen in love, and he wanted you to be happy. He takes care of the people who help him, at least to a point."

The room still wasn't any brighter, but Natalie felt a kinship for the machine in front of her. "Then why are you here?" Natalie asked. The hybrid didn't answer, waiting for Natalie to clarify her question. "Why was this thing placed here?" she asked, gesturing to the android and the pool as one object.

"John's disciples were looking for ways to control these ships," the hybrid began. "Otherwise, the ships would fly themselves. Your Cylon leaders ordered the existing control functions ripped out, but the new interfaces couldn't handle the housekeeping. Imagine if making your heart beat, growing hair, balancing blood sugar and muscle glycogen, or healing ligaments all required conscious effort. Jacob, Leoben, and two of the model Fives had the idea of taking hybrids out of the stations and adding them to the chain of command, to offload the chores with the Cylons at the helm. Now they're trying to replace the hybrids with more of their own automation."

"And then why are you here?" The hybrid seemed pleased that Natalie had made the distinction.

"These puppets were meant to be my chorus," the hybrid explained, speaking as the intelligence behind the marionette. "But John and his disciples decided that they should be silenced. I wanted to see another side of humanity, so they showed me. Rather than let all of you be destroyed, I turned my back and left you on your own, hoping to bottle up my grief. Now I have even more." The hybrid looked around the room at orbital imagery of the Twelve Worlds, ablaze in nuclear bombardment.

Seeing it from far away, Natalie could detach herself from the human element and began to explore the more comfortable perspective. "This has happened before," she said with a hint of defiance.

The hybrid's grip tightened on her hand. "You didn't bring justice for their original sin, you made it your own." In the still air of the room, a few drops of water remained on the hybrid's face since she had wetted her hair. But, in the flickering lights of the shifting screens, Natalie saw something she had never expected: a tear made its way down the side of the hybrid's nose.

"Jake said that you had a plan. What will happen to us?"

"I have a plan for the stars, but the one I'm not as sure of is the plan for you. Can you and the colonists forgive one another?"

Natalie dove back into an analytic mode. "There are fifty-thousand Cylons, probably another fifty-thousand colonials in Adama's fleet, all eager to put their feet on dry land. Plus, survivors on the twelve worlds in dire straits." The hybrid pulled her closer as she spoke. "I don't know if you could find ten thousand willing to live together. Would your plan work with that many?"

"I'll do it for the sake of ten," the hybrid stopped her. "But can you forgive one another?"

It was a mission, not a question, Natalie realized. She clutched the hybrid's hand with both of her own and nodded.

"You must have peace within you, to have peace around you," the hybrid said. "And I mean, the things you have been hearing and experiencing these past few days. You won't hear them anymore unless you choose to. And, you might see things in a different way. Don't be afraid."

"Jake turned over every rock trying to get the voices out of my head."

"He's still at it," the hybrid said with satisfaction. "While we've been talking he did a masterful job of diverting Harper away from this room and prodded him to wire their bypass through a junction I control. They'll have quite a time figuring out why things still don't work."

"I want to see him."

"Only if you promise not to slap him. Go send him something." The hybrid pointed to the keypad by the door and woke up its screen. The barrage of invasion footage dropped away one screen at a time but left the purple-flecked darkness in its wake. The only steady light came from the island around the hybrid's bath and the keypad.

Natalie typed out a text message to Jacob: "Playdate's wrapping up."

"While he's on his way, I wanted to talk about peace inside."

Natalie seated herself again with her back against the side of the pool by the hybrid's arm. "Close your eyes," the hybrid told her. "Think of the colors that make you happy, then I'm going to add some sound."

Her first thought was of bright yellow, like the wisp but with more solidity, against shades of green. It was the yellow that made a perfect complement to the navy colored pantsuit—perhaps why she had liked the gift so much. From the walls all around the room, Natalie could hear chirping, a gentle breeze moving over leaves, the clicks of insects and stalks of grass brushing against one another.

"Now open them," the hybrid said. The walls displayed a vivid panorama of a rolling meadow, bustling with wildflowers swaying with the waves of grass under a blue sky dotted with low hung clouds. Yellow rose bushes presided over the commotion on the turf, one of them dominating the displays in front of Natalie.

"It's beautiful," Natalie said of the tranquil image that filled the room. She stood and explored the scene, pausing to examine the subtle motion as she stepped from wall to wall.

"Hmm, not quite," the hybrid said as if she were still working on a problem. "Let's try again."

Natalie complied and seated herself back on the rim of the bath. The sounds didn't change, but Natalie worked on her breathing as if she were meditating. "Take what you've just seen," the hybrid urged her. "And now take yourself there."

Natalie felt vegetation brush against her ankle as the room got warmer and more humid. The sounds came closer than the walls and she heard the flow of water behind her. Natalie opened her eyes to find the field everywhere, tangible stalks of bluegrass and foxtail around her feet with aconite flowers interspersed. The nearest of the rose bushes stood only a few meters away.

Behind Natalie, the hybrid reclined with her hands folded in her lap and her legs crossed in an elbow of the stream that coursed through the meadow, her pool now a collection of black slate and granite stones. "I like this better than my usual digs," she said with approval.

"Where was this place?" Natalie asked, tethering herself to reality. She didn't expect it still existed, at least in such a pristine state.

"Nowhere in particular, but it's the place I made just for you."

Natalie turned to the hybrid with a sheepish grin. "I feel like I know this place. But I guess I always expected daffodils."

The hybrid shook her head and examined the rose bush. "No, it's the yellow rose, all the way. Myriad glimmerings of truth, granting your heart its youth. Besides, these clouds have plenty of company," the hybrid gestured to the herd of white puffs drifting overhead.

The rose bush was surrounded by grasses that came just above Natalie's knees. She brushed the tops of it with the backs of her curled fingers, then ran her left hand along one of the stems. She knew that there were thorns, but having never experienced it, she didn't raise her fingertips or slow her hand down enough to keep from inflicting two tiny wounds upon herself. She let go of the stem and examined her hand, but the projection of her consciousness into the meadow hadn't broken.

The hybrid reached up with her own right hand, curling her own fingers and splaying them in the same tender, guarded manner. As Natalie returned to the hybrid, their right and left hands couldn't clasp in a usual handshake, but their digits interlocked instead. The hybrid pressed against Natalie's index finger with her thumb, and Natalie folded her own on top of the hybrid's to lock the secret handshake or win the impromptu thumb war. The wounds disappeared.

"Are you helping me imagine this place?"

"I was a moment ago," the hybrid replied. "Every Cylon has a place like this, I just helped you find yours. It's not a safe space, and you can't retreat here to protect yourself. You can project your mind here when you're confused."

The hybrid lured a butterfly onto the back of her thumb and let its wings come to a stop. Without scaring it off, she reached her middle and fourth fingers around its delicate wing to stroke its thorax, then clasped it in the precision vise of her fingers. In terror, the insect began to flap its wings, but her hold didn't relent or constrain its body in a way that the creature could injure itself. She stroked it again until the wings stopped fluttering, then let it go.

"Jacob's here," the hybrid said.

Natalie turned to see Jacob standing in her imagined meadow. He had ditched the jacket, the tie, and the top button of his shirt. He met her warm smile with a nervous look that shifted between her and the hybrid.

"It's so beautiful," she said as she threw her arms around Jacob. He glared at the hybrid as he clutched Natalie. The meadow melted away as she embraced him: the screens had been displaying the hybrid's standard collage of sensor feeds and diagnostics at least since Jacob entered the sanctuary.

"She's got her head back in order." The hybrid tossed the first words over her shoulder, then turned in her pool to look at the two of them. "But if I can't convince you to keep secrets of your own, I need you to keep this next one for the sake of each other."

One of the centurions at the door marched forward and withdrew an object from the protective case behind its upper breastplate. The mechanical construct pressed the oblate trinket, a red, elongated gem encased in a glass polyhedron with a silver cage, into Natalie's palm. It would have looked natural as part of a miniature sculpture collection on a mantle, or the coffee table in their studio.

"Keep this out of sight if you can," the hybrid instructed them. "And lay low. As I told Jacob, I'm not a delicate thing, but the two of you are.

"I may draw a lot of John's attention. He may even destroy the puppet in front of you, this whole base star, to safeguard his plans. If that happens," she said, addressing Natalie, "you will be the only way for the Cylons to find redemption."

"You need us to make peace with the colonists?" Jacob asked.

"I want you to make humanity whole again," the hybrid replied.

Natalie slipped the trinket into her pocket. It was light, but the cage and the glass enclosure seemed sturdy and hard. "What's this?" she asked.

"You're safer just keeping it with you," the hybrid said. "John will know what it does, but he'll also box you both if he finds out you've got it. The nano-construction gel, the white foam you encountered, wasn't the only thing delivered through those apertures." The hybrid pointed the Natalie's coat pocket. "But, I can't do anything with that, so I'm regifting. If you find a use for it, you'll know." The hybrid beamed at Natalie and tapped the side of her own head.

The hybrid replaced her cap and returned to her usual posture. The psychobabble resumed as Jacob held Natalie's waist. He watched the android in its pool, then returned to studying Natalie's face as the sentences filled the room. She didn't experience any pain, but she was taking in the words. Natalie glanced at the hybrid and then back to Jacob with an inquisitive look, making him uneasy until she draped her arms around his neck.


End file.
